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A Memoir
by Glen David Gold
Book Reviewed by:From the best-selling author of Carter Beats the Devil and Sunnyside, a big-hearted memoir told in three parts: about growing up in the wake of the destructive choices of an extremely unconventional mother.
Glen David Gold was raised rich, briefly, in southern California at the end of the go-go 1960s. But his father's fortune disappears, his parents divorce, and Glen falls out of his well-curated life and into San Francisco at the epicenter of the Me Decade: the inimitable '70s.
Gold grows up with his mother, among con men and get-rich schemes. Then, one afternoon when he's twelve, she moves to New York without telling him, leaving him to fend for himself. I Will Be Complete is the story of how Gold copes, honing a keen wit and learning how to fill in the emotional gaps: "I feel love and then it's like I'm driving on black ice with no contact against the road." He leads us though his early salvation at boarding school; his dream job at an independent bookstore in Los Angeles in 1983; a punk rock riot; a romance with a femme fatale to the soundtrack of R.E.M.; and his attempts to forge a career as a writer. Along the way, Gold becomes increasingly fascinated with his father's self-described "cheerful amorality" and estranged from his mother, who lives with her soulmate, a man who threatens to kill her.
Clear-eyed and heartbreaking, Gold's story ultimately speaks to everyone who has struggled with the complexity of parental bonds by searching for - and finding - autonomy.
Glen David Gold is a writer best known for his wryly observant, mordantly funny novels Sunnyside and Carter Beats the Devil. It turns out, however, that his most remarkable story might be his own life story, which is what he turns to in his new book, I Will Be Complete...continued
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(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
In Glen David Gold's memoir's second section, Gold recalls his experiences working at a branch of Hunter's Books in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles (near UCLA) during a gap year he took in college. Hunter's, as Gold notes, was "part of a local handful of stores that wouldn't survive the new realities of commerce." Indeed, according to a Los Angeles Times article from 1987, Hunter's Books closed three locations on Christmas Day that year - including the Westwood location where Gold had worked - and never recovered.
Hunter's never even saw the dawn of e-commerce, which certainly claimed the lives of many other Los Angeles–area bookstores. But other independent bookstores continue to thrive in Los Angeles even today:
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If you liked I Will Be Complete, try these:
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Darin Strauss, author of National Book Critics Circle Award winner Half a Life and Chang and Eng
I Will Be Complete is the best memoir I've read in years. It's likely the best memoir published in years. Gold's a novelist and this book reads like the best fiction. It's exciting, beautiful, and clear-eyed in a way most memoirs aren't. Oh, and you'll never forget this charming, intelligent, unique narrator.
